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Education-talk Krawchuk
Ken Krawchuk's Speech on education in the commonwealth Education of our children is one of the most important issues facing us today. But despite its successes, Pennsylvania's educational system is falling short in too many areas, primarily because our government schools are virtually a monopoly -- over 90% of all children in Pennsylvania attend one -- and like any monopoly, the result is higher costs, poorer service, and lack of choice. There are several things we can do to improve education. But increased state funding is not an answer because money is not the problem. A recent study by Standard & Poors show that one-third of the best performing schools receive less than the average funding, while the one-third worst receive MORE than the average funding. Obviously there are problems with our schools that cannot be solved by simply throwing more money at them, and great successes that aren't tied to funding. As Governor, I would work to uncover and exploit those successes and remove the failures. The "privatization" plans, such as what is being attempted in Philadelphia are also not the answer. What they are doing is merely outsourcing their government monopoly, not offering true choice. The result is that the children and teachers are still trapped in the same system. We need to open up education to a wider, more-diverse variety of choices, curriculums, and approaches. Homeschooling, charter schools, community schools, cyber schools, and apprentice programs should all be encouraged, not with state funding or state mandates, but by cutting back on the over-regulation of the education monopoly which exists today. One of the best ways to eliminate this monopoly is to introduce competition, and the ideal way to do that is to bring parents back into the equation. Specifically, parents should be given the power to send their child to any government school, not just the one in their neighborhood, and the funding which would have gone to their local school would follow the child to the school of their choice instead. That way good schools would gain more students and more funding, while bad schools would fail; or at the very least, the bad schools will be put on notice by their decreasing enrollment that they should put their house in order or soon be closed down. In this manner, competition would work to improve education without spending any additional tax dollars. Unfortunately, the two old parties are trying to take education in an entirely different direction. Under HB 2200, parents can ultimately be thrown in jail for the crime of choosing a government school outside their neighborhood, jailed for the crime of wanting a better education for their children. Libertarians believe in empowering parents, not jailing them. So I fully support HB 2560 which allows homeschoolers far greater latitude to decide how to educate their kids. The funding of our schools should also be changed on a fundamental level. Although I favor complete separation of school and state, my oath to uphold the constitution takes precedence, and Article 3, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania Constitution states that The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth. Being constrained to work within that context, I believe that the best solution is that the law should allow for as much local control of the schools as possible. But today virtually everything is decided by an unelected Board of Education in Harrisburg. They decide what gets taught, what doesn't get taught, who teaches, who doesn't, who must go to school, which school, for how long, and a host of other things that are best decided by parents, not by bureaucrats. Worst of all, a barrage of regulations and unfunded mandates continually emanates from Harrisburg. This must stop. As Governor, I promise to veto every single unfunded mandate, not just for schools, but in any other area of government as well. These unfunded mandates are a large part of the reason that local property taxes continue to rise. Rather than burden the local schools with these mandates, the Legislature should take the responsibility to fund them, especially one of the largest unfunded mandates, special education. By eliminating these unfunded mandates, introducing competition, allowing more parental control, reducing over-regulation, and returning our educational system to its constitutional bounds with more local control, our children can receive the education they deserve at the best possible price. However, this solution of increased competition only maintains the status quo of publicly-funded education while keeping the sources of those funds essentially the same. But there are ways to reduce, even eliminate reliance on the traditional source of education funding, such as the property tax. One method of reducing the cost of education is to privatize the educational system. How much of a reduction in cost will that bring? To come up with hard numbers, I pulled out the Yellow Pages and called all the private schools in my local Abington area: the Catholic schools, other religious schools, Montessori's, community schools, Abington Friends school, etc. and asked what they charged per year. I heard numbers ranging from the $3,000's through about $6,000, with exclusive schools like the Friends topping out at over $10,000. Then I took the Abington school district budget of $67 million and divided it by the 6,600 students, yielding a cost of over $10,000 a child. The upshot: If we privatized the schools, we could cut property taxes in half overnight. School boards already have the option of outsourcing education to local, less-expensive private schools, but usually reserve that power only for troubled kids. Instead of outsourcing education to less-expensive neighborhood schools, they prefer instead to run their own schools, and at a much higher cost. Part of the reason for this is the prohibition in the state constitution against spending tax dollars on sectarian schools (Article 3, Section 15), precluding them from outsourcing the education to the least expensive schools, the Catholic schools. There are other problems associated with outsourcing of education which would make me wary of attempting to use them, and the biggest is what I call the Political Golden Rule: "He who provides the gold makes the rules". For this reason, I fear vouchers, over and above the constitutional prohibition which severely restricts their possible uses. Because along with the state funds would come the mandates and rules, and within a few short years the private schools would not be their own masters anymore. Which leads me to the best solution, the one which not only reduces the cost of education, but also gives the framework to eliminate the onerous, unhumanitarian property tax. I call it the Great Offer: "You will never have to pay the property tax again, provided that you pay for your own child's education." Most people to whom I've made the Great Offer have welcomed it with open arms. People who already send their kids to private schools love it since they won't be paying twice for their kids' educations (once out of their own pocket, once out of their taxes). Childless couples, singles, and seniors welcome the Great Offer because they won't be forced to pay for a service they do not directly use. Even those who are sending their children to government schools welcome it because it means an overall reduction in the amount of money they have to pay for education. They aren't forced to buy into the Taj Mahals of public education, but rather can shop around for the best bargain, just as they would when buying a car or house. Since a normal education (i.e., non-Friends School-style) costs half as much as the government schools, they spend less. The cost is made even lower by allowing for more non-traditional alternatives, such as homeschooling, apprentice programs, cyber schooling, and other educational opportunities as-yet unheard of. Sweetening the deal even more, the dollars that parents would pay to educate their kids would not be "laundered" through the bureaucracy -- because for every dollar spent in taxes, a large percentage of that dollar is swallowed by the huge bureaucracy of government, leaving only a small fraction to reach its intended goal of educating our kids. With parents spending that dollar directly on education, they get more education for the dollar, more bang for the buck. Best of all, when parents pay for their own kid's educations, they can see the light at the end of a very expensive tunnel. Certainly educating their own kids is expensive in its own right, perhaps even requiring a second mortgage. But once that loan was paid off, they'd be DONE with it. That's much better than the alternative they face today, which is having to pay the property tax not only when they're 40 years old, but also at 50, at 60, 70, 80, 90, on and on forever, not to mention higher and higher assessments with every passing year. So the Great Offer promises an end to spiraling property taxes, an end to expensive government education, an end to the lack of diversity and choice. In the process, our kids get a better education, and too often we forget that the kids are what education is really all about. Links * Education and PA Constitution-talk Krawchuk, another Education speech from Ken Krawchuk * Education * Schools Krawchuk